Making and Students' Self-Reported Changes in Their Capabilities

• In Event: On the Ground Responses to the Anthropocene Context: Civic and STEM Engagement as Global Citizenship

Abstract

Making and Students’ Self-Reported Changes in Their Capabilities
In this poster, we examine the potential of maker-based education to change students’ sense of their abilities to act capably in the world.

Scholarly Context of the Work
“Making” is a loose term for the practice of creating and/or modifying artifacts, often by combining disparate crafts and technologies. The emergence of the “Maker Movement” represents a re-popularization of long-standing hobbies and crafts, reinvigorated by lower costs, greater ease of use, and improved communication networks (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014). Making connects with Anthropocene issues in two ways. First, tool use is an important capability of humankind in remaking the world, both physically (McGrew, 1993) and epistemologically (Vygotsky, 1978). Some have noted the explicit connection between enthusiasm for making and Marxist calls for redistributing the means of production to the disenfranchised (Schwartz, Tsang, & Blair, 2016). Second, making may foster the development of adaptive expertise – the ability to think flexibly and learn new things as needed (Martin, 2015). Such adaptability is a key to several educational frameworks, such as Common Core Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices - Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and Next Generation Science Standards (National Research Council, 2011), which encourage the development of “21st Century Skill” necessary for engaging in a rapidly changing world.

Methods and Data
Our data come from a multi-year university community partnership focused on creating making spaces for school aged youth. Specifically, we focus on one site located within a small, diverse, public charter high school. University researchers, including undergraduate mentors, partnered with a high school teacher to run a weekly maker class within a “pop-up” makerspace in the high school. Students engaged first in orienting and skill building activities to develop skill and confidence, and then transitioned to open ended project-based curriculum where they imagined, designed, and built projects of their own choosing.

This poster will describe the site and the pedagogical principles we employed in an effort to create rich, equitable maker learning environment. We will then turn to an analysis of end-of- year interviews, specifically focusing on students’ answers to the question, “Do you think that this work in the class has changed what you're capable of?” Participants were high school students who completed one or more years of the maker-centered class. Our data for this paper consists of 45 interviews across 3 years of data collection and 34 unique individuals (one participant was interviewed 3 times, and 9 were interviewed twice).

Results
Findings from a qualitative, thematic analysis show that students universally saw themselves more capable but were diverse in what benefits they reported. Self-reported capabilities included specific skills (e.g., sewing, electronics), but also frequently included more generalized capabilities such as increased confidence, persistence, ability to work with others, and creativity.

Significance of the Study
Results of this work show the potential of making spaces to shift students’ perceptions of themselves as capable agents in the world. We consider implications of these findings for the place and role of maker education in relation to Anthropocene issues.

Author

• Lee Michael Martin, University of California - Davis